Creating cross-cultural learning communities on the Internet and the Japan Gigabit Network - integration of media tools into collaborative learning

This paper describes how the integration of collaborative media tools can create an environment to effectively motivate students to acquire communicative skills for cross-cultural communication. In Japan, particular emphasis is being placed on combining receptive and expressive skills, especially writing, into comprehensive language acts to meet the need for a global perspective in education. In order to achieve this goal, we organized a computer supported collaborative activity integrating Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and the Japan Gigabit Network (JGN) into other media tools such as Chat´n´Debate. The results of a questionnaire to students show that the system supports a pedagogical focus on cross-cultural communication in collaborative learning situations.